Shortcut to Pull GitHub Repos

This is a MacOS tutorial on how to create a shortcut to pull all your local GitHub repositories at once. I have a lot of repositories, and I don’t want to pull them one by one. So I created a shortcut to do this. Here’s how you can do it too.

1 Shell File

The first thing you need is a shell file that pulls all your repositories. Here’s the code:

#!/bin/bash

# Text formatting
BLUE='\033[0;34m'
GREEN='\033[0;32m'
NC='\033[0m' # No Color

echo -e "${BLUE}Starting to pull all repositories...${NC}\n"

# Find all .git directories, excluding the .git directory itself if it exists
find . -type d -name ".git" ! -path "./.git" | while read -r gitdir; do
    # Get the parent directory of the .git folder (the actual repo directory)
    repo_dir=$(dirname "$gitdir")
    
    echo -e "${BLUE}Pulling${NC} ${repo_dir#./}"
    cd "$repo_dir" || continue
    git pull
    cd - > /dev/null
    echo ""
done

echo -e "${GREEN}All repositories have been updated!${NC}"

Save it as pull-all-repos.sh in the root folder of your GitHub repo. I saved it here:

2 Automator App

Secondly, we need an Automator application:

1. Open Automator and select “Application” as the type of document.
2. In the search bar on the left, type “shell”. You’ll find “Run Shell Script”.
3. Double click on “Run Shell Script” from the actions list. It will appear on the workflow area on the right.
4. In the shell script box, enter:

cd ~/Documents/GitHub # Change to your GitHub repo dir
./pull-all-repos.sh

5. Save it as an application. Mine has the name being “Pull All Repos”.

Or you can simply download and unzip this application in my repo.

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Thirdly, we need a Quick Action created by Automator:

1. Open Automator and select “Quick Action” as the type of document.
2. In the search bar on the left, type “launch”. You’ll find “Launch Application”.
3. Double click on “Launch Application” from the actions list. It will appear on the workflow area on the right.
4. The application will be “Contacts” by default. Change it to the “Pull All Repos” app.
5. Save it. Mine has the name being “Pull All Repos”.

You’ll not see the saved directory, but if you wanna access it, it’s here:

/Users/<Your User Folder>/Library/Services

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The last step is to set up a keyboard shortcut:

1. Open System Settings and scroll down to “Keyboard”.
2. Click on “Keyboard Shortcuts…”.
3. Select “Services” on the left, and then open the “General” dropdown menu on the right. You’ll see the “Pull All Repos” here.

Image.png

4. Click on the white space on the right and assign your preferred shortcut.

Hints:

1. If you download my application, the system will block you. You need to go to “Privacy & Security” in “System Settings”, scroll down and grant permission to this app.

2. The first time you run this, you’ll be prompted:

zsh:2: permission denied: ./pull-all-repos.sh

You need to run these codes in your Terminal:

cd ~/Documents/GitHub # Change to your root dir of GitHub repo
sudo chmod +x pull-all-repos.sh